A secondary, pseudonymous Net identity created by an individual in order to give the impression that there are multiple people who agree with a given point, idea or action, when in reality there's only one. Sock puppets are usually used to post follow-ups that praise their owner or echo his convictions, in the hopes that they will convince real people to pay attention to him and/or his agenda. While the first Sock Puppets appeared on Usenet, they have long since spread to other electronic venues, most notably blogs.

Sock puppeteers are not limited to individuals, though. Numerous groups — political, commercial, religious and atheistic — have attempted to manipulate public opinion on the Net using false identities that purported to be "real" people. And multiple Sock Puppets are a necessary part of any Astro Turf campaign. Fortunately, they tend to be fairly heavy-handed and reasonably obvious to most people.

The term is a long-standing one in electronic media, dating back to the early days of the Net in the 1980s. It originated on Usenet and is still seen there, especially in the anti-spam groups. The term itself comes from the practice of creating a cheap puppet by pulling a sock over your hand, and then pretending to talk to it. One sub-category of the sock puppet is the "concern troll", in which a sock puppet pretends to be part of a faction but makes "concerned" derogatory comparisons to another faction for whom the troll is a sock puppet. Another is The Shill.

This is one of the more popular "Internet Argument Techniques." very common in forums and mainly used by trolls this can be a source of frustration to users trying to have an honest debate. Can also be a source of laughs not only for the trolls and others in on the ruse, but for other users following the argument. Once discovered this is commonly used as another point against the user and/or another way to discredit their arguments.note Of course, someone could always create fairly obvious sock puppets claiming to agree with the opposition for this very purpose, if they were a particularly Magnificent Bastard.

Sock puppets are banned in many online venues. Wikipedia is notoriously plagued with them; its "anyone can edit" philosophy makes it hard to keep them out, while its bureaucratic processes provide incentives for their creation.

Ad Hominem, can occur if someone on the internet accuses another of being a sock puppet when the accused is actually providing an honest opinion of dissent and asking an honest question about accountability and credibility. This might be done by either trolls or as an example of Fan Dumb or Hate Dumb to not have to answer to a criticism or dissenting opinion while still discrediting the person that dissented.

See also Astro Turf and the second definition of Meat Puppet. Not to be confused with an actual Hand Puppet made from a sock. For when you're not sure whether the person is sincere or not, that's Poe's Law.

Real-life Examples:

open/close all folders

Print media

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first examples. He attacked his former employee's paper, which published encyclopedia articles in alphabetical order starting with "abortion", by writing as women named Martha Careful and Celia Shortface in a friend's paper. He later switched to Busy-Body, and drove his former employee out of business, and started using that paper for his own purpose.

In 2009, Scientific journal publisher Elsevier was busted with publishing "journals" that were merely sock puppets of medical companies, containing nothing but positive reports about the drugs they produced.

In 2010 the Cleveland Plain Dealerreported on the surprising number of letters to newspapers across the United States from one "Ellie Light", who always claimed to be a resident of whatever city each paper covers. The letters were all nearly identical, and praised President Barack Obama while castigating detractors and the press for not supporting him.

Stewart Copeland admitted to doing this to help boost sales of The Police's first single, "Fall Out", writing letters to different music magazines praising the single.

One episode of Kitchen Nightmares had a restaurant owner adding ridiculously positive reviews of his own restaurant at various websites, claiming his restaurant was even better than Gordon Ramsay's. Ramsay was not amused, to say the least.

Watchdog (or at least the Rogue Traders part) had an amusing example of a case where the owner of a sewing machine company used these... over the telephone. Seriously, he'd pretend to be multiple people working for the same company to respond to complaints with threats and insults and fob off any unsatisfied customers wanting a refund. You can read their official write up of the story here on their site

When Bill O'Reilly was pressed to provide proof that France's economy was taking a hit because of his call for a boycott after their lack of support for the United States' actions in Iraq, he cited an article in the wholly imaginary Paris Business Review.

Video games

In the age of online gaming where one has to have an account to play a game, it's not uncommon to find people with Sock Puppet / Alternate accounts. Due to the nature of this, please keep all examples in this section to general practices and notable instances.

Players in an MMORPG might have a puppet account used simply as storage for excess items. These were often called "Bank" alts or mules, depending on the game. Sometimes a guild might actually pay for an extra account just to act as an extra storage for items.

This practice isn't just limited to free-to-play games, mind you. Some players might have a "dummy" account just to be a Griefer. This is a special form of GIFT - because even if a player is anonymous, if they can actually get banned, one would not want to lose all that time and effort they invested into their account. On a sock puppet? They got nothing to lose. Many of the worst Griefers out there are people on a dummy account just making the players' lives hell.

The new Dungeon Keeper for iOS systems had managed to get 5000 5 / 5 star reviews by people, some of them even saying "This game is trash" to "EA has another smash hit!". All 5 / 5 star reviews. It wasn't until actual gaming sites and magazines started to come out with 1 / 5 reviews that the contrast became evident seeing as its reliance on being an Allegedly Free Game tries to get you to pay up to 80 dollars for the largest amount of "crystals".

Some games, especially those that have factions, tends to have some sort of restriction that prevents you from interacting with anyone who doesn't pick the same side you do (Outside of PVP modes, of course). Most games let you create more than one character, but some, like DynastyWarriorsOnline, don't let you create any more than a few, or even one character, keeping things like Trading impossible with most people without a second or third account.

Web Original

Online newspapers having discussion forums: To discourage (among other things) sock puppetry, many online newspapers require users wishing to participate in discussion forums to register with (and depending on the newspaper, use) their real name. Some even require using a credit card to both validate the account and defeat attempts to circumvent the rules (e.g., creating multiple free web-based e-mail accounts simply to create several screen names). This way, arguments with merit gain support or at the very least create valid debates, while weaker or invalid points that would otherwise be supported only by the sockpuppet accounts are quickly disputed and flushed out.

Video game publishers have been known to offer jobs which consist of using sockpuppets to post on various gaming forums to praise their products. They even provide outlines for different consistent personas to create and maintain (girl gamer, casual gaming jock, etc.) and daily post requirements which can have three digits.

Microsoft is infamous for having paid shills to post pro-Microsoft messages in forums with notably anti-Microsoft attitudes. So has Apple.

Several of the entries on Wikipedia's BJAODN (Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense) pages consist of debates that involved Sock Puppets. Somehow, several of those debates turned into parodies of the Sock Puppet concept.

Another notable incident in Wikipedia sock puppetry is the deletion debate for the article on Starslip Crisis, a webcomic by Kris Straub. The discussion overwhelmingly favoured deleting the article, which a passing admin then enacted. At this point Straub revealedhe had been the nominator. And ten of the user accounts arguing for deletion. From the same IP. Using factually incorrect arguments. It's bad form to misbehave on the Wikipedia to make a point, but everyone seemed to be too busy gaping in astonishment at Straub'sbrilliant execution of the plot to notice.

By way of background: one of Wikipedia's criteria for article existence is that the subject be Notable in its field, which is subjective and open to interpretation at the best of times and an absolute minefield when it comes to things which exist solely on the internet. "Webcomics vs. Wikipedia" had been a growing debate for years before Straub's experiment. Considering Wikipedia itself mainly resides on the net, this suggests the somewhat ironic question of its own notability.

Wikipedia's own rules specifically say that deletion debates are not a vote, and thus that simply having a majority in favor of either keeping or deleting an article doesn't carry the day. The closing admin is supposed to to weigh the quality of both sides' arguments, not just the quantity. Thus, the admin was clearly Doing It Wrong, though given Wikipedia's well-known systemic bias toward deletion in such debates that's hardly a surprise.

According to an August 29, 2006 article in the StarTribune of Minneapolis City Council member and mayoral candidate Pat Carr from Rochester, Minnesota, was caught using a sock puppet to praise himself on a local newspaper's website.

In 2006, a senior editor of The New Republic was caught at the game. Lee Siegel, who writes a blog on The New Republic's website, was discovered to be using a Sock Puppet with the name "sprezzatura" to provide counterspin when most of the comments to his blog proved to be rather harshly critical. Unsurprisingly, "sprezzatura" praised and defended Siegel so obsequiously and extravagantly that the real posters on the blog quickly identified it as a sock puppet. Because of its implications about the duties of journalists in the online medium, the matter was actually covered in the September 13, 2006 New York Times.

Siegel went on to write a book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, that warns about the dangers of the internet's anonymous culture.

Keep in mind this is also a man who seriously used the term "blogofascists" in some of his writings, and you can practically smell the schadenfreude.

The comics author Reginald Hudlin has been caught using sock puppets to defend his work on Black Panther.

In the Harry Potter fandom, an individual using the handle Msscribe famously created a whole zoo of sock puppets over a period of years in order to increase her popularity and become friends with Big Name Fan Cassandra Claire. She was eventually unveiled in very long and epic chronicle of her misdeeds by... a sock puppet. The event is referred to as Puppetgate. There's even a meme; "Maybe they're Msscribe" or "Maybe I'm Msscribe."

It's been theorized that Charlotte Lennox is in fact multiple people, given the staggering amount of work that went into chronicling the whole thing.

A tool called the Wikipedia Scanner has been developed, which allows people to search for anonymous Wikipedia edits from specific IP ranges — those belonging to a specific company, for example. Hilarity Ensues.

The PR wing of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs has an entire staff of people whose job is to create sock puppets in order to spam the comment sections of news articles and various newsgroups with either pro-Scientology messages or confusing junk posts. (Example) Unfortunately for them, the more active spammers aren't very good at hiding themselves.

Nonetheless, Wikipedia eventually imposed a blanket editing ban on all computers associated with the Church of Scientology and its affiliates.

Some college faculty have even resorted to boosting their own ratings on Rate My Professors with anonymous reviews. This Biology professor is #6 on the list of "hottest professors" (yep...they have a list for that) mostly through some very positive reviews that are all suspiciously capitalized perfectly, similarly indignant, and make repeated statements ("You won't get into med school," "Go to her office hours and you'll do fine," etc.). A few raters have even pointed out the obvious sock puppets.

In New Zealand, we have a similar site, "Rate my Teacher" (be careful saying it out loud). One particular english teacher attempted to boost her ratings with a pair of all-five-star reviews in a sea of 1s and zeros, again, capitalized correctly and punctuated clearly.

Less seriously, it's not at all uncommon in larger media threads for tropers to create alternate accounts to roleplay as characters from the works being discussed.

One lone, particularly fanatical Smallville fan had 28 separate socks, each with different opinions and writing styles. And had them fight. It was apparently related to her spontaneous proposal to actor Tom Welling (who in Real Life is happily married to someone else).

/b/, the haven of trolls that it is, thrives on socks, especially when one is trying to direct another poster to a questionable link or delete his own hard drive. They're charmingly referred to as samefags, though accusations like this generally get thrown around regardless of whether or not they actually think the other anons are sock puppets.

An interviewer for Harper's magazine, trying to get in touch with The Room auteur Tommy Wiseau, first had to arrange an interview through a man named "John," allegedly the "administrator" of Wiseau Films. (John is the same guy who sent cease-and-desist letters to That Guy with the Glasses for reviewing his film.) Judging by John's peculiar brand of broken English, the writer theorized that John may in fact be Tommy Wiseau himself.

The promo material for The Room included enthusiastic blurbs from alleged publications/websites called Entertainment Today and Beverly Hills 90210 (not that one), that just happen to have the same shaky command of English and odd obsessions of Wiseau himself.

The message boards at the official Star Wars site feature a few recurrent socks, but none as persistent as one originally known as The Rev, who has created literally thousands of fake accounts to harass the boards.

This is done quite frequently on IMDb.com. it involved a person with the username "GeniusIQ600". He quickly got to be disliked after reporting anything even slightly off topic, claiming that he was taking screencaps of disparaging replies to him and having his parents sue the repliers, and insisting that a female poster was mentally ill because she was bisexual. Sometime after, he changed his username to impersonate this female user (during which point in time he made a thread stating that "she" spoke out against Genius after not taking her medication) and began starting a handful of sock puppet accounts which always came to his aid and insisted that he had "good ideas". Perhaps the strangest one was when he tried to pass off a sock puppet as an IMDb mod to intimidate other users into not disagreeing with him.

In 2003, a Price is Right fan site known as Golden-Road.net was spammed by one of the show's substitute announcers following the death of Rod Roddy. The person in question (Daniel Rosen) created numerous sockpuppet accounts which bantered back and forth about how great his voice work was... when in fact he was almost universally despised by both the legit members and the show's staff. Nobody was amused.

An example of a "concern troll" version of a sock puppet was Tad Furtado, a top staffer for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH), who was caught posing as a "concerned" supporter of Bass' opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, using the pseudonyms "IndieNH" or "IndyNH". "IndyNH" expressed concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable.

Peter Pedersen, member of Swedish parliament, once gave a suggestion that can be watched subtitled here: that somebody invent a battery that not only powers a car but also, using for instance a dynamo, somehow extracts so much energy from the car that simply by driving the car one will receive enough power to keep on driving it. In other words, Pedersen wondered why they couldn't just invent a perpetuum mobile, which it is well-known that nobody can ever do since it would violate at least one fundamental law of physics. When this was put on YouTube, scornful and jeering comments poured in, but one recently registered user started defending Pedersen vigorously. It didn't take long for most users to come to the conclusion that this user was Mr. Pedersen himself.

Fanfiction author Jared "Skysaber" Ornstead, who has long claimed problems with hatemail and other shenanigans from people who do not like his work or style, used a second online identity, "Perfect Lionheart" for over three years starting in 2007 in order to escape them. Lionheart and Skysaber favorited each other on Fanfiction.net, and Lionheart denied claims that he was Skysaber made by readers who found their styles virtually identical.

There were persistent rumors during the JerichoNuts! campaign that CBS was using paid trolls to break up the movement. Whether or not that was even possible, several sock puppets were discovered in the later days of the fandom. One person was caught having as many as seven handles, all used to spread their socio-political viewpoint (right wing religious conspiracy theories) on the same board. There was an extreme amount of trolling going on in the fandom at the end of the secound season. Some put it down to the show's Broken Base; others thought the campaign may have attracted a certain personality type; but some still point that a rather large number of those trolls were very web-savvy, very organized and rather literate compared to your usual flame-baiters.

Kongregate allows anyone over the age of 13 have as many accounts as willing. The practice is used even by the moderators, some of which have their moderator status on a separate, alternative account with no post count and no points, used to moderate while the main account is used for actual fun. Many users, including some moderators, have a main account holding all the pizazz, and multiple "alt" accounts acting precisely as sockpuppets. Sometimes, due to no accounts-per-email limit and the fact the registration takes about a minute and the account is active immediately after, new accounts are created just for a single purpose of having a fitting name to answer a discussion. This system, however, causes people to be practically unbannable - anyone banned can just make another account and resume whatever was he or she was doing.

This is why eBay seller ratings have to be taken with a grain of salt: some sellers create fictional accounts for the purpose of giving themselves feedback.

Some users will cheat the system if they're not happy with how their auction is going. If the bid is too low they will use another account to outbid at the last second so they won't have to sell.

Scott Adams, creator of the "Dilbert" newspaper strip, got caught using a sockpuppet called PlannedChaos to defend himself (and promote himself as a "certified genius") on Metafilter.

Dennis R. Upkins, author of "Hollowstone", got caught◊ writing a review of his own book on amazon under an assumed name. In particular, it was noted that his sock pretended to be a bisexual woman who praised the book for its female characters (his book has been criticized on some forums for poor depictions of said characters). He was caught because his sock account was linked to his real credit card, so Amazon displayed his real name next to his assumed identity.

One of the more celebrated cases happened when people noticed that someone named Mary Rosh was bombarding Usenet, email lists, blogs and even Amazon.com with posts praising and defending controversial conservative academic and pro-gun advocate John Lott. "Mary" claimed to be one of his former students and said that Lott was "the best professor I ever had." After one journalist figured out that Mary's posts and emails came from the same IP address as Lott's, he fessed up.

A YouTube user known as "RonPaulHatesBlacks" is suspected of having around forty sock accounts, which he uses to vote his comments up.

One of the worst offenders is the Molly Holly stalker. He has over 30 accounts on YouTube (most notably one called noragreenwaldisacunt) plus many more on Blog Spot and Daily Motion. His posts are all suspiciously similar in style. Word Of God is he fell in love with her but went over the Despair Event Horizon when she got engaged to her now-husband.

An absolutely massive problem on GameFAQs supposedly, with no real rules to stop people making/using multiple accounts to the point some users had over 500 of them. More to the point, after some people fail to use sockpuppets to fool others on the forums, they've been known to mass suicide the lot, aka post offensive/illegal content with all the alts.

Star Destroyer Dot Net gives each admin and some of the moderators one sockpuppet account. One account is their "everyday use" account, the other is the account they use when making administrative decisions. For example, site owner Mike Wong goes by Darth Wong normally and switches to AdmiralKanos when he needs to (for example) ban someone. Apart from that, sockpuppeting is a bannable offense.

Matt Dillahunty was accused of this, when he performed a Secret Test of Character on the members of a certain forum he was a well-known member of: He wanted to prove to the forum's critics and detractors that, contrary to their claims, the people of said forum were polite, reasonable and open to ideas; So he posed as a new user called "Curious" and made a post with controversial but also sincere arguments (and not at the extent of trolling) in the hopes of making the point of "See? This is how you make arguments without being shut down or banned" to the detractors; Unfortunately, the critics were proven right when his post was unilaterally removed (and then went down on a memory hole) and his subsequent posts following the process to appeal this were met with disdain and ridicule by both the members and moderators. It wasn't until Matt revealed his true identity that he was then treated more respectfully, but then he was immediately accused of sock puppetry and also demanded to issue an apology for his "social experiment", and when he refused he was banned from there.

LiveJournal communities often see Sockpuppets used to get around bans.

Ben Eisenkop, better known on Reddit as Unidan, was a well known member of the site's community... until he got caught for blatant vote rigging using alternate accounts, often upvoting himself and downvoting his opponents (due to how the site works, having votes just below 0 means your post is hidden. He basically silenced the people he argued against this way). He was shadowbanned in July 2014.

Fictional examples:

Anime & Manga

In one arc of Detective School Q, a student was murdered after using this for Cyberbullying. His target was a girl who was doing better than him academically, and after an extended period of bullying on the school's chat system, the target declared she'd kill herself. When the girl disappeared immediately after, an admirer assumed she'd really committed suicide.

In Durarara!!, before the Dollars genuinely became a huge group, the founders posted under different handles to give the impression they were; and stationed in Ikebukuro. Apparently effective, exhibited when a number of people (actually just one person: Mikado) agreed they should do good things like cleaning graffiti; and amazingly, a large prominent one, thought impossible to remove especially if alone, was wiped clean overnight.

May also be a reason so many people of different ages and backgrounds join after the password is leaked to them by Izaya; because no matter how big the group is getting, or how ordinary you are, someone would always reply.

It's also known that Izaya has a number of sockpuppet accounts (most notably Nakura). Volume 9 notes that these aren't just internet handles, but entire dummy identities with addresses, pre-established histories (he bought them off of people), and sometimes even faces (He gets his secretary Namie to play Kanra in offline meetings, for example).

In The Sandman, during the 'Cereal Convention', one participant's efforts to promote a magazine on their twisted occupation is one of several things that flag him to the others as a gate-crasher. They then show that they really don't care for gatecrashers.

Literature

In Enders Game, pre-teens Peter and Valentine Wiggin set up anonymous accounts called "Locke" and "Demosthenes" on the online adult political forums (which serve much the same purpose as the blogosphere in real life). They then use Sock Puppet accounts to comment on their main posts in order to quickly gain notice/influence. Quite notable as the book pre-dated fora as a large part of internet culture, and in fact pre-dated the World Wide Web (but not Usenet).

Not only Shakespeare but also Charles Dickens, in Martin Chuzzlewit. Mrs Gamp's Imaginary Friend, Mrs Harris, is essentially a spoken sock-puppet, since she lives (by Mrs Gamp's own accounts) entirely to agree with Mrs Gamp's opinions, flatter her character and express confidence in her abilities. Nobody else believes she exists.

The Charles Stross novel Halting State discusses sock puppets, by name, extensively. An apparently missing man turns out never to have existed.

In The Simpsons episode "Lisa Goes Gaga", Lisa is voted to be the most unpopular student at school and this is reflected on the school's forums until Lisa's family shows her someone is posting positive comments about her. The kids at school then believe Lisa is cool because someone else thinks so, until Bart discovers that Lisa had a notepad with posts on the forum Lisa planned to write. Bart then exposes Lisa as the sock puppet on the forum, causing all the kids to make fun of her. (It takes the help of Celebrity StarLady Gaga to restore her self-esteem.)

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy